A new low for customer service? Couple's shock as British Gas breaks into home, replaces meter ... and changes the locks!

British Gas customers may be used to being kept on hold by a call centre and receiving uneven service.

But Carol Driver returned from work find that the energy giant had broken into her home, replaced the gas meter with a pay-as-you-go machine and changed the house's locks.

The shock for 35-year-old Mrs Driver and her husband Richard was all the more severe because - as far as they were concerned - the couple had not fallen behind with bill payments.

Unbeknown to them, British Gas had failed to change over the details for the gas and
electricity account at the Leytonstone address from the previous tenant.

Carol told Thisismoney / MailOnline Money: 'We had no idea what was
going on – as far as we were concerned, we’d done nothing wrong and had
been paying our bills.'

Heated: Carol returned home to find British Gas had broken in, installed a pre-payment meter and changed her locks. Four weeks later she was still waiting for an answer until This is Money stepped in.

'I called British Gas four or five times over the next week and ascertained that they thought the former tenant was still living there, but it will not to do anything to help fix the problem.'

When the couple moved into the home in June last year they changed over all the household utility bill details, including British Gas, but the energy firm had failed to update their details.

'Because all our bills come out of a joint account, we presumed everything was okay and it was coming out by direct debit,' Carol told This is Money.

'We continued to receive gas and electricity throughout the past year, so didn’t think there was a problem – until four weeks later when British Gas broke into our home.'

'We had been continuing to give the previous tenant his post/bills, until he stopped coming round to collect them, without leaving a forwarding address. He didn’t mention that British Gas was in contact with him.'

The Drivers say they are more than happy to pay British Gas for the past year, but they had not been able to speak to anyone at the company to sort the issue out.

Help: The post spotted on Twitter where Carol was complaining about British Gas' lack of contact.

Carol made four phone calls in the
space of 10 days but did not receive a satisfactory
answer from anyone at the company. She then turned to the social media
website Twitter to post her complaint (see above).

Only
after intervention from This is Money / MailOnline Money, did British
Gas apologise and arrange for the pre-payment meter to be changed back
to a credit meter. The firm has also wiped the account to give them a
clean slate.

British Gas say that there is no record of her details being changed and that she should have realised something was wrong when she hadn’t paid an energy bill for nearly a year.

As her details were not updated British Gas continued to contact the previous tenant and so Carol was not sent any notifications or bills.

A British Gas spokesman said: 'We appreciate this has been very upsetting for the customer, and we apologise for the difficulties she experienced in resolving this.'

Carol said: 'It was a complete shock to us and has been very distressing. If this had happened to anyone else, who didn't know where to turn then they might not know what to do. That is just very worrying.'

My British Gas nightmare: Some things just don't change

More than five years ago I had a terrible experience with British Gas that made sure I will never use the company again, comments Simon Lambert.

Simon Lambert

Unlike in Carol's experience, British Gas never actually broke into my home, but it threatened to do so and the lack of help she has had in sorting her problem out sounds only too familiar.

What is disappointing about all this is that British Gas, after admitting a customer service disaster in recent years, is meant to have got its act together.

To cut a long story short, my nightmare came about when I moved home and British Gas wrongly charged me for an initial period, then added my proper bill on top.

The first problem was that it didn't seem to be able to get rid of that wrong amount, the second was that, while I was calling up desperately trying to get it fixed and being promised it would be, British Gas was sending me a raft of increasingly threatening letters.

I finally got it sorted by writing to the chief executive of British Gas' parent group Centrica, Sam Laidlaw, marking the envelope private and confidential, addressee only, to ensure it got to him.

At that point I then had a personal letter back from him and the problem was sorted by a high-level team.

My advice to anyone who finds themselves in this form of customer service nightmare is to do the same. Read our How to write the perfect letter of complaint guide and write a letter, straight to the top man or woman and address it private and confidential, addressee only.